“All Star Superman” is fundamentally a story about death, morbidity, and parasitism but at the end of the day it’s also a resounding call for hope, optimism, and gratitude. It’s a grim storyline but by focusing on Superman, the most anti-grim character of all, the movie feels anything but. “All Star Superman” realizes the genre-defining promise of *aspirational storytelling* in a uniquely poetic way, depicting Superman’s most super feats as all within the grasp of ordinary humans. →Read more
Inexhaustibly entertaining in its wit, charm, and craft. To Carroll’s carnival of language, Disney adds a carnival of sight and sound. What results is a carnival for the imagination; a whirling dream of delightfully bizarre images, sounds, and characters. →Read more
“Wonder Woman: Bloodlines” somewhat struggles to balance its delightful amalgamation of characters and plot threads, which includes the interesting decision to tell Wonder Woman’s origin in a modern context along with introducing and establishing multiple supporting heroes. →Read more
“A Serious Man” is something of an under-appreciated masterpiece. The Coens come as close as they ever have to autobiography with a story about a Jewish family living in 1960s suburban America. The Coens specifically set the Gopnik’s in their hometown St. Louis Park, Minnesota and include an older sister and numbers-focused professor father (replacing economics with physics) like they had. By partly rooting this movie in their experiences, the Coens gave it a more grounded feeling, but never at the cost of what Roger Ebert called “hallucinatory logic” in the context of The Big Lebowski. →Read more
“Stranger than Fiction” combines the high-concept rom-com existentialism of Groundhog Day and the meta-textual postmodernism of Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation to create an unpredictable, quirky, and self-aware fable about the tension between the human desire to live each day of life to its fullest and the simultaneous human tendency to narrativize each day of life into some Life Story. →Read more
Outrageously funny and surprisingly insightful, this coming-of-age dramedy is a scathing satire of religion, in particular Christianity of the Catholic flavor and its puritanical norms surrounding sex, but without ever being hateful, preachy, or dishonest. →Read more
“Pan’s Labyrinth” is an endlessly imaginative, oddball fantasy-coming-of-age story that takes place against the backdrop of Fascist Spain and seamlessly blends influences such as classic literature like Alice in Wonderland, European folklore, children’s fairytales, gothic body horror, and world religions. →Read more
“They’ll Love Me When I’m Dead” is a surprisingly impassioned, meticulously researched, and artfully crafted portrayal of perhaps the biggest victim of one’s own success in history; someone whose entire career was always in the shadows of his original, shadowy masterpiece; an artist who spent most of his life chasing the glory of his very first artwork which was forever deemed by everyone else and without his say the very greatest in the medium. How can you ever top that? →Read more
This three-part episode is both a launching pad for the most successful and loving cinematic exploration into the Superman mythos ever and a delightful, imaginative stand-alone story that powerfully tells the poetic story of the last son of Krypton. →Read more
Review: Secret Origin: The Story of DC Comics (2010)
This documentary lovingly chronicles the history of DC Comics, but more importantly the characters — particularly Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman — and the imaginative genre to which they belong that the company introduced and built upon for the subsequent 75+ years; characters and storytelling tropes whose widespread and iconic influence no one could’ve predicted. →Read more
About
Virtue ethics, market process economics, anarchist political theory, movie reviews, commentary, Batman.
